Bruce's Blog

   First, some background.  We have been a 7.02 environment for awhile (server, client, & mail template).  We have multiple partitioned and clustered servers across our wan.  We also have a 6.5 server running Sametime 6.5 for IM only.  Things have been working pretty well.  We have talked about migrating to V8, but a number of things have held us up.  First, V8.0 was quit stable enough for us.  Then when 8.01 & especially 8.02 came out, we had other priiorities (both other projects and finances).  Then the real financial crisis hit (rising energy costs, rising raw materials costs, and our major markets are automotive and housing so no new orders coming in).
 
   Well, last weekend, something happened that meant we couldn't stay on the sidelines anymore.  Last friday night all 3 of our mail servers crashed with "PANIC: Invalid pool free chain" faults.  Two of the server  re-booted automatically, but we had to manuaaly re-start one of the servers.  We didn't worry too much about it.  Things happen, ya know.  But when it happened again on Saturday night. it was time to take it more seriourly.  I started searching the forums on LDD.  I found a couple of entries with similoiar issues.  They referenced a technote about invalid internet messages crashing SMTP task.  The fix was to upgrade to a 7.02 hotfix, 7.03, or V8.

   Monday morning , aftertalking it over with my boss, we decided the most bang for the buck upgrade was to go to V8.02.  That evening, I started upgrading.  We have 9 Domino server on 4 physical servers at 3 sites.  The first 3 physical servers (3 Domino server partitions) upgraded fine in a couple of hours.  The last server's upgrade hosed in the middle with a JVM error.  It took me a couple of hours to resolve (finely had to manually remove registry entries and data folder and do a "fresh, clean" install).  This server has always had issues, so it wasn't terribly surprising that the upgrade hosed.

   Even with the problems.  my whole Domino environment (except Sametime) is now upgraded to V8.02 and running fine in one night.  I was already running the 8.02 client myself and now was able to upgrade my mail template to start utilizing all the new goodies (out od office service it great).  I used all the compression (LZ1 on attachments, design compression, & document compression) on both my mail file and archive mail file (we do server-based archiving).  Saw a 25% reduction in size.

   Now it's time to start planning the V8 client roll-out to our 150ish client users and 50-75 INotes users so they can see the same.